3 Managing police data: paper
From the inception of the ‘New’ police in 1829 there was a heavy reliance on a complex paper-based bureaucratic system to record all working aspects of organisational life. It is important to realise that this was highly innovative at the time. Very few organisations worked in this way as modern information management was in its infancy.
Figure 5: A page from a criminal record ledger, West Yorkshire Police, 1898 [Description: A photograph of an open page from a book of police photographs with personal and criminal records of prisoners. The page is printed up with a space for a photograph, and lines for ‘Description of’, ‘age’, ‘trade’ etc. The bottom section of the page is a printed table for filling in the offence, date and place of conviction and sentence. All spaces have been completed in handwriting. The name of the prisoner is Samuel Lund and a photograph has been inserted showing him sitting holding a board containing his details. He wears a suit with waistcoat and tie.] Source: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co205163/book-of-police-photographs-with-personal-and-criminal-records-of-prisoners
Recording and retrieving information was important to the daily practice of the modern police from the outset. Data of many types was kept in large, heavy books or ‘ledgers’. Beat books recorded the extent of each patrol or beat; an occurrence book was filled in at the end of the beat with each officer transcribed anything of note from his pocket-book; crime ledgers were used to transfer incidents classed as crimes from the occurrence book. Many other ledgers were used (for example, registers of street vendors and registers of aliens).
The police were also early adopters of photographic technology. In the 1840s, some forces started including small portrait photographs in the criminal record ledgers. This was indeed cutting-edge, as the first commercially available camera had only been released the year before. By 1871, the Prevention of Crimes Act mandated the photographing of every prisoner, with the now familiar convention of full-face and profile portraits being widely adopted by both prisons and police by the mid-1890s.
Further innovations (including pre-preprinted forms, use of typewriters, card index systems) enhanced the very sophisticated paper-based information storage and retrieval systems developed by the police. The effectiveness was such that they persisted until the 1990s, when their use was gradually replaced by computerised systems.
Activity 2 Card index systems
The development of card index systems, which enabled information about crime and criminals to be cross-referenced across multiple record types, was a further innovation of the early twentieth century. By 1913 the Metropolitan Police had moved their indices of active criminal cases from books to cards in their Criminal Records Office and by 1939 the Home Office were ‘encouraging’ provincial forces to record all crimes on card indexes which, after classification, could then be forwarded to them at the end of each month.
Figure 6: Police officers using the card index system at New Scotland Yard, 1967 (Description: A black and white photograph showing a very long room. All down the centre are banks of screens and control panels being used by police officers wearing headphones. The operators are being supervised by uniformed officers. In the foreground at a desk with his back to the camera is another police officer looking at boxes of card indexes.] Source: Getty – https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/an-officer-using-a-card-index-system-in-the-information-news-photo/672080251?adppopup=true
Read the excerpt below in which a detective from a regional police force recalls using card indexes for major investigations in the 1980s:
Basically, before we had these computers, we used to run a card index system [...] You had big, round—size of that table [pointing to the long dining room which seats approximately 8 people]—big round carousels with cards. If you had somebody who said there was a blue car you used to have to index a blue car, so you made a card for a blue car. And then if somebody says it was a Cortina, you used to have another card for a Cortina […] And if somebody said it was ABC 123 you used to have to make another card […] So, if you imagine, if you just had a car, you had four, umm, four, if not five cards to make out [...] Sometimes you used to have to have like ten people filling the cards out.
Comment
As this brief description shows, police forces were using card indexes as intelligence databases, in effect creating a type of primitive computer. While highly innovative and often effective, human error was often a flaw in the system. Removed, lost, misfiled and misspelt cards could result in false returns and such card systems were pushed to their limits (and sometimes failed) in big investigations. A government report into the failings of the investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper murders identified the use of paper-based card indexes as a problem and pushed for the computerisation of criminal investigation data.
While the use of paper-based information systems seems archaic to us now, it is important to recall that, during the nineteenth century, this was innovative. Within the constraints of the technology, police forces continually adapted and enhanced their information retrieval systems. While it was not until the later twentieth century that police forces moved to computerised systems, as you will learn in the next section, they had been involved in the early development of computers from the 1960s onwards.